Intel Unveiled Some Massive Innovations Yesterday But The Only Thing People Are Talking About Is This 'Smart Bowl'

We've all got one: A large bowl that sits in the kitchen or the
hall or the dining room where you put all the junk you don't have
any other place for: keys, mail, rubber bands, matches,
batteries, take-out menus, whatever.

At CES, the big tech conference in Las Vegas, Intel unveiled a
"smart bowl" that could change all that forever. It's a wireless
charging bowl: You dump your phone, iPod, earpiece, Fitbit or any
other gadget that needs a charge into it and — boom! — pick it
out a while later and it's fully charged.

No more wires. No more jacks. No more plugs and sockets.

Your gadgets go into the bowl (probably with a bunch of other
non-tech junk too) and voila! They're charged.

Brian Krzanich and the most-talked-about bowl on the
planet this week.Intel

But as people left the gargantuan Venetian ballroom where he gave
his speech, and as Business Insider chatted with other people at
CES who had been at the event, it was clear that the bowl was the
thing that really caught everyone's imagination.

Basically, we're all saying the same thing: I've got a bowl full
of junk in my house, and I would totally use a smart bowl if it
charged my stuff while it was in there.

There's something else going on here too. While Intel's
announcements were impressive, they weren't perfect. Some of them
had a somewhat sinister surveillance bent to them. Intel has a
smart watch coming that allows an app user to track its wearer —
like a parent tracking their kids — for instance.

Separately, although Intel's other new devices seemed useful
(like
the Jarvis earpiece that can handle a conversation and manage
your phone even when it's not switched on) the design wasn't
great. Jarvis looks like a hearing aid, not something you'd
actually wear by choice.

The smart bowl, however, was sleekly designed, simple and useful.

Everyone seems to want one. Intel, however gave few details about
it. You can
read Krzanich's speech here, to see exactly what he said
about it. And there are some
technical specs here. But as far as we can tell, right now,
it's simply a prototype and not a product.